Artificial intelligence cannot replace experienced engineers. At least not yet. This is the conclusion Ford reached recently after a painful cost of billions of dollars and the loss of three years of work. Ford decided to bring back 350 veteran engineers who had left to pursue AI use after discovering that the technology produces products of lower quality than those from human engineers.

Bloomberg News reports that the manufacturer chose to rehire the skilled engineers to correct major errors made by autonomous design and quality control systems. We mistakenly thought that integrating artificial intelligence and adapting our design process would let us create high-quality products, wrote Ford vice president of hardware engineering Charles Pohn in an internal report. It shows that experienced engineers departed before their knowledge was properly integrated into Ford AI tools. Without that base the computerized tools repeated low-level actions and missed design flaws.

The company defends the technology and according to Pohn who spoke with Bloomberg artificial intelligence is a wonderful tool but only as good as the data used to train it. Chief operating officer Kumar Galhotra sees it differently. He says the manufacturer relied too much on autonomous quality control tools that delivered unsatisfactory results. The rehired veteran engineers will help upgrade the system meant to replace them train junior human staff and design processes for effective artificial intelligence use.

Besides the returning engineers Ford created a department of 40 engineers to handle software quality control including over 100000 AI-driven preventive tests. We brought back technical experts who hunt for failure points before any part reaches the production floor according to Galhotra.

Ford CEO Jim Farley said the decision to fire human engineers and replace them with AI in the manner executed caused economic damage of hundreds of millions of dollars partly from quality issues that triggered recalls and warranty problems. Ford holds the negative record for US recalls this year with 11.2 million vehicles called in 34 notices in just half a year. This follows a record 2025 when 12.9 million cars were recalled across 153 separate notices.

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